If you’re looking for an excellent location to use your metal detector, you should head to the nearest park. You’ll always want to check if it’s okay to dig there, but if it is, you’ll find lots of great signals while you’re there.
The key rule to metal detecting is that you want to go where the people are. Because parks are popular with every age group, they are the hotspots in their communities. And if it’s an older park, you stand a great chance of finding all kinds of things, both modern and decades old.
But when you’re hunting in a park, there’s a few things you’ll want to remember.
Bring a Small and Big Coil if You Can
Most metal detectors come with standard-sized 8 inch to 11 inch coils, but you can buy smaller coils.
A 5-inch coil is nice to have when you’re hunting in a park because it helps separate the targets if you’re in a trashy area. Parks are often loaded with signals, which makes detecting there a little tricky.
If your detector is picking up too many targets in the same area, a good signal might be overwhelmed by some of the junk signals. You’d hate to pass up a coin or a ring because you used the wrong size of coil.
Those bigger-sized coils still have a place in park hunts though. They can help you cover ground a lot faster than a smaller coil will. And when you start getting some interesting hits, you can swap out your coil to the smaller size and see if there are multiple targets.
Crank Up the Discrimination
As we all know, people treat parks like they are their own personal garbage dump. You’ll find a lot of targets and many of those will be trash – the things you don’t want, like cans and bottle caps.
If you have all day to spend there, you can try digging some of the trashy signals because you never know. Metal detectors can be tricked and some potentially valuable or interesting items can sometimes register as junk finds.
But if you only have an hour or two, you have to make that time count by finding as many sure-hit targets as possible. For that, discrimination is your best friend. Turn it up to its highest setting and do a walk through. If you don’t get any hits, turn it down a little at a time, until you start registering signals.
Look for Picnic Tables
People drop all kinds of coins and personal belongings next to picnic tables. That’s often one of the best places to search when you’re in a park. If you see a single big tree near the picnic table, that’s even better. People tend to flock to the shade of big trees when they are at parks in the summer.
Dig Responsibly
Make sure you dig neat plugs to uncover your signals, and when you’re done, fill them in thoroughly and stomp the ground. If too many detectorists abuse park privileges by not filling in holes, eventually metal detecting won’t be allowed at parks. So do us all a favor and be as protective of that land as you would be if it were your own.
Bring Some Headphones
Even if you don’t typically wear headphones while you are metal detecting, you’ll want to have some handy in a park. You’ll want them for two reasons – so people don’t get annoyed with the constant beeping of your metal detector and so the noise of the other people in the park doesn’t drown out your signals. If you’re finding good targets, you need to be able to hear them so you know where to dig.
